Gunter's Mental Wanderings about Poetry and Religion

Today has been an uneventful day for me. As Melissa’s first day at the hospital, I took it easy and stayed at the hotel most of the day.  The courtyard is a peaceful place to sit and read, and I didn’t want to go too far without a cell phone. 

 

Since I have no new or interesting pictures or stories about Kathmandu, I’ll talk some about what I read today, which relates well to my journey in the East.  I brought along a bunch of books, one of which is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  I thought poetry would be good for a trip like this because I would likely have lots of short snippets of time to read, which are more suitable for poetry than an absorbing novel.  I’ve never been a big fan of Whitman.  I pay him some obligatory respect in my 11^th grade class by looking at a few samples, but I rush through to things I find more interesting.  He wanted the common worker to read his poetry, so it’s written almost like everyday speech, with no attempt to be pretentious or follow academic contrivances.  But that turns me off.  I like poetry to be challenging to understand and I like academic contrivances.  (I enjoy T.S. Eliot for this reason.)  Whitman just seems too, I don’t know, casual and rule-less for my taste, as though he wrote whatever came to his mind and never edited a bit.

 

But I brought along Leaves of Grass because I know I’ve never given Whitman a fair shot.  It’s been on my list to read for a long time, and I’ve avoided it.  A while ago I read a book called The American Classics, in which the author argues that there are only five books that warrant that label: The Great Gatsby, Huck Finn, Walden, Moby-Dick, and Leaves of Grass.  I knew I had to get through Leaves if I wanted to feel knowledgeable about American lit. 

 

I am going somewhere with this, so bear with me—

 

Whitman’s poem seems so arbitrary and repetitive, so uneven and long-winded, but it’s actually easy to read, and I found myself enjoying it.  I thought it funny that I’d go to Nepal to read something that’s quintessentially American.  But as I absorbed line after line of commentary on the beauty of humanity, the oneness of humanity, the joy and depth that can be found in observing humanity, I decided it was particularly appropriate that I’d read it in Nepal.  This is a place where I pretty much sit back and watch people, as Whitman probably did on the streets of Brooklyn.  I’m observing daily life of tailors, deliverymen, artisans and salespeople, cab drivers and butchers, policemen and beggars.  (No garbage men though.)  When do I do this at home?  Never—I’m too busy watching TV or something.  And even when I’m out on the street I don’t think about what I’m seeing because it’s too familiar.  (The formalist school of thought in literature says that art succeeds when it de-familiarizes us with our environment—when we notice that a stone is a stone.)  Anyway, Whitman struck me as not exclusively American in his observation about the connectedness of society, but as more universal.  Perhaps being in Nepal was the best way for me to appreciate what he was trying to get at.

 

It goes deeper yet.  Whitman’s ramblings about the interconnectedness of life include much reflection on death and birth.  He meditates in his verse on the timelessness of the universe, the nature of the body, the nature of the spirit.  He declares that all people are timeless, that life is the same as death, that each person has god in him/her.  And so on.  The rationalist in me gets annoyed with all this new-age mumbo jumbo, but that’s to oversimplify Whitman’s reflections.  Furthermore, the rationalist look at the universe and the spiritual one are not mutually exclusive: the most devout believer and the most devout non-believer can be equally in awe of the timelessness and grandeur of the cosmos.  But I’m getting sidetracked—my point is that Whitman’s philosophy, as he develops it over 100 pages of exclamation points, suddenly struck me as very similar to Eastern philosophy and religion.  It sounded like something straight out of a Buddhist or Hindu text.  The notion of reincarnation (without using that word itself) was present on every page almost.  It was deeply religious in its own way, and completely non-Christian, as far as I could tell, despite mentioning God repeatedly. 

 

So I was once again struck by the appropriateness of my reading Whitman in Nepal.  I was almost through with Leaves when I decided to look at that long introduction I’d skipped over.  After some explanatory notes about Whitman’s early life and the start of his writing, the critic who wrote the introduction began to explain why he felt Leaves of Grass was a remarkable work of literature.  As it turns out, much of that explanation includes a comparison of Whitman to eastern religions!  After patting myself on the back for drawing that comparison independently, I read the rest of the introduction.

 

The critic argues that Whitman had zero knowledge of eastern religions when he wrote it.  For that reason it is a brilliant work.  It is as though Whitman developed a philosophy very similar to Hinduism and Buddhism completely independently, in the midst of a heavily Christian culture.  Part of Leaves of Grass describes a specific moment of revelation that led to the philosophical observations that comprise much of Leaves.  Such moments of enlightenment, or ecstasy, are well documented by individuals throughout history.  Their true nature (hallucination, hypnosis, divine revelation, etc.) is debatable, but time and again individuals claim such moments and report similar enlightenment following them.  Buddha’s is the most famous.  (Buddha’s enlightenment under the tree is the central moment of eastern religion, as the Exodus or crucifixion is to western religion.)  Anyway, the critic who introduced Leaves argues that Whitman’s text is deeply religious and has more in common with the Baghavad-Gita, the Upanishads (sacred texts of Hinduism) or Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (French poetry) than it has with other American texts.  It’s a kind of emotional mind-dump that follows moments of ecstatic vision, and the philosophies that result from those visions are remarkably similar.  Again, I’ll point out that Whitman had no knowledge of these texts—they had not even been translated into English when Whitman wrote Leaves.  The introduction says that when Thoreau met Whitman after the publishing of Leaves, Thoreau asked Whitman if he knew much Indian philosophy, and Whitman responded, “No, tell me about it.”

 

Well…if you made it this far with me, I applaud you.  I suppose this is what you get when you put a literature and religion nerd in the middle of an ancient religious city and tell him to blog.  Well anyway, that’s what I’ve thought about today.  I didn’t expect all this gobbledygook to come out in the blog, but I actually kind of like it.  Maybe I’ll try to turn it into a publishable essay.  I’ll entitle it “Reading Whitman in Nepal.”  Wait, no, that sounds like a plagiaristic spinoff of “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”  I’ll keep thinking about it.